COMMENT
Crime and Punishment
Will the Deeply Flawed Hutton Report Hobble the BBC?
A journalist botches a single report, his superiors defend him, and suddenly the future of the British Broadcasting Corporation is clouded with talk of increased oversight, a funding shakeup, and the specter of self-censorship? Something doesn’t fit. The picture gets clearer, though, when we realize that what is happening to the BBC has less to do with Andrew Gilligan’s careless broadcast last May (in which Gilligan, reporting as fact something that he inferred from conversations with an anonymous source, accused Tony Blair’s government of embellishing its Iraq dossier to bolster the case for war) than it does with the BBC’s foes, both ideological and economic, who want to see it hobbled.
Gilligan’s source was David Kelly, a leading government weapons expert, who committed suicide in July after being identified. The investigation into the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death, headed by the senior judge Lord Hutton, culminated in late January with the release of a report that exonerated Blair and excoriated the BBC. In its wake, Greg Dyke, the BBC’s director general; Gavyn Davies, the chairman of its board of governors, and Gilligan all resigned.
Hutton’s myopic report avoided so many important aspects of the Kelly saga that it can hardly be considered the final word. For instance, Hutton said it was “unnecessary” for him to express an opinion on evidence that senior members of the defense intelligence staff had serious doubts, which were ignored, about the content of the Iraq dossier. Remember the headline-grabbing claim in the dossier — trumpeted dramatically by Blair in September 2002 — that Iraq could launch chemical and biological weapons within forty-five minutes of the order to do so? What Blair had failed to mention is that that bit of intelligence referred only to short-range battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles that could threaten Europe, as the press understood him to mean. What does Hutton say about this? “A consideration of this distinction does not fall within my terms of reference.”
So the question of whether the Blair government “sexed up” its dossier, as Gilligan claimed, remains open.
Another defect in the report — one that is potentially more chilling — is Hutton’s perversion of the law governing free speech. Britain has no First Amendment, but freedom of expression is well enshrined in statute and bolstered by case law. What Hutton says, though, is that “false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media.” Period. If such an interpretation became the law of the land, a journalist couldn’t report anything told to him — by the foreign secretary, an MP, a corporate whistleblower, anyone — unless he could verify that it was true. Such an interpretation betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what journalism is, and of its role in a democracy.
For the BBC, the timing of the report could hardly have been worse. The corporation’s ten-year government charter is up for renewal in 2006, at which point it must defend its entire structure and funding formula. Several opposition lawmakers are pushing for more direct government control of the corporation. The license fee, which is levied on every British household with a television and generates most of the BBC’s funding, is under scrutiny by competitors who have long complained that the fee is an anticompetitive tax. Then there is the matter of the search for a new chairman and director general, which is already under way. Tony Blair has the final say, and fear that the new executives will bring a note of caution to the BBC’s newsgathering is hardly the stuff of conspiracy theory. Even the corporation’s rivals worry that the fallout from the Hutton report could chill the BBC’s journalism. Jon Snow, an anchor for Channel 4, wrote recently that the death of David Kelly could ultimately rob Britain “of the best public service broadcaster in the world.”
The BBC and the Blair government have been increasingly at odds since the late 1990s, when Blair courted Rupert Murdoch (who owns several London papers and a stake in the British Sky Broadcasting network) in an effort to raise Labor’s profile in the business community. The situation worsened during the war in Iraq, with Blair’s aides complaining vigorously that the BBC’s reporting was biased against the war.
In the wake of the report, the BBC has all but ended the practice of its reporters writing for other publications, and begun a review of its editorial processes, including the unscripted interviews between reporters and anchors (like the one in which Gilligan leveled his “sexed up” charge). This, in our view, is the properly weighted response. It is crucial that the BBC’s enemies not be allowed to use this deeply flawed report to undercut one of the world’s last major news organizations devoted to public-service journalism. The Daily Mail — hardly a knee-jerk defender of the BBC — put it best in a January 30 editorial: “The Mail offers the BBC the following advice: Don’t lose your nerve. The greatest treasures you possess are your independence and reputation for impartiality. Once lost, they may never be recovered . . . . The public loves and trusts you far more than the politicians, which is why the latter will always be against you.”
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